Cabin staff of SATA and its Azores Airline unit are to go on strike on 1 and 2 May, with the SNPVAC union committing its members only to assuring three flights a day as a skeleton service. They have said the strike is justified by the company’s failure to observe various points in the collective employment agreement, such as giving employees sufficient notice when they are called up for a particular service, as well as other agreements signed with the union.
“We’re analysing the reasons cited by the union in the notice,” Menezes told Lusa News Agency. He said that if the strike goes ahead the company “will do everything to minimise the impact on passengers” and that it had “already triggered the contingency plan to deal with any strike”.
Relative to the union’s demands, he stressed that SATA “doesn’t yet have a balanced financial situation” but is “still in a recovery process” as well as being “constrained by the legislation in force, namely the state budget”.
On 23 March, Menezes told members of the Azores regional assembly’s standing economy committee that the first round of talks with banks on the refinancing of the company had concluded, and that lenders’ openness to such a plan “was good”.